Anonymous asked: This is gonna sound stupid, but I really need help with my dialog. To me, it always sounds like it's repeating itself and I feel as though I'm gonna bore my readers. Help please?
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In order for dialogue to be interesting, there needs to be a point to it. It can't just be a random scene with two or three character shooting the breeze. Every conversation has to move the story along in some way by providing information to the audience. That information could be any combination of the following:
• filling in details about something that happened
expressing thoughts on something that is happening now
• discussing concerns about or making plans for something that could happen or is going to happen
establishing back story or setting details
• developing character personalities, goals, motivations, stakes, internal conflict
• developing character relationships and romantic tension
• increase tension
The best place to start when drafting dialogue is with the scene itself:
1) What is the goal of the scene? What has to happen to reach that goal?
2) Who is in the scene and what do they each need to contribute to the scene to accomplish the scene goal?
Once you have that figured out, you can start to figure out how the conversation might go.
Sometimes it helps to act the conversation out by pretending to be each character and saying what you think they might say. At the very least, reading the dialogue out loud once it is written can help you find ways to liven it up. Remember to bring each character's personality into their dialogue. Things like cadence, word choice, and speech patterns help to differentiate one character from another and make the dialogue more interesting.
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Writing tips & tricks
DiversosA collection of tips and tricks for my fellow writers. :) (Some chapters will have charts that go with them) WARNING: this book is unedited so it is full of mistakes Notes: although some of this is from me, it's also from places such as tumblr, inst...
